Gmail suffers two-hour outage

Google's Gmail suffered a two outage this morning, starting at around 10:30am, but it now back online for most users.

Worldwide access to the webmail service affected

By
Jeremy Kirk
| 24 Feb 2009

Google's Gmail suffered a two outage this morning, starting at around 10:30am, but it now back online for most users.

The scope of the outage was not immediately clear, but at least some users in Europe and Asia could not get access to their inboxes or had to wait a minute or more for them to open.

"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users," Google said in an advisory on its Gmail support site. "We're working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused."

Last August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free webmail service but also companies and organisations paying for Apps Premier, the company's hosted suite of collaboration, messaging and office productivity services. Apps Premier costs $50 (£34) per user per year.

To compensate for the downtime, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and also said it would get better at notifying people of problems. Google offers a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for Gmail for users paying for Google Apps Premier.

An outage on August 11 lasted about two hours and affected almost all Apps Premier users. The other two, on August 6 and August 15, hit a small number of Apps Premier users but locked some users out of their accounts for more than 24 hours.